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Jerome Tuccille
Jerome Joseph Tuccille (May 30, 1937 - February 16, 2017) was a libertarian author, best known to libertarians for his 1971 memoir, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. Life Tuccille (too-CHILL-y), known as Jerry, was born in the Bronx, New York City, the son of Virginia (Marano) and Salvatore Tuccille, a taxi driver. He had a sister, Carol. He grew up in the Bronx neighborhood of Throgs Neck. Raised a Roman Catholic, he attended Catholic schools in the Bronx: Fordham Preparatory School and then Manhattan College, where he earned a psychology degree in 1959. After graduation he entered the Marine Corps.William Grimes, "Jerome Tuccille, Libertarian Author and Trump Biographer, Dies at 79," New York Times, February 24, 2017. Web, Feb. 27, 2017. In 1965 he married Marie Winkler, who survived him. The couple had one son, (who writes as J.D. Tuccille), and a daughter, Christine Merry.. Early libertarianism As Tuccille later described himself, he was a disaffected Roman Catholic looking for a new faith when he discovered the writings of Ayn Rand and her philosophy of Objectivism. "For the moment I considered myself unique, a lone and courageous individual who had found the Holy Grail after years of floundering," he wrote in It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand. He rejected some of Rand’s views (on art and sex, for example) as too narrow, but embraced her political philosophy of minimal government and maximum personal freedom. He became heavily involved in the emerging libertarian movement. He wrote an early libertarian manifeto, Radical Libertarianism: A right wing alternative (1970). In 1971 he wrote an op-ed in the New York Times (perhaps the first explicitly libertarian article to appear the paper), in which he called on conservatives “who still care about such things as peace and justice and racial harmony” to vote for candidates “who really mean peace when they say peace; who understand and intend to promote the politics of decentralization, of pollution control, of economic and judicial reform, and so on all the way down the line.” He documented his early history in the libertarian movement of the late 1960's and his intellectual development in It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand: A libertarian odyssey (1971), a book which attracted widespread attention in libertarian circles. Writing in Reason in 2016, Nick Gillespie called the book "the single-best political memoir in existence." Writing of it in The American Enterprise in 1998, Martin Morse Wooster, wrote: :There are two reasons why Tuccille’s account remains fresh and valuable. First, he is an excellent stylist, who has superb control of the techniques of the New Journalism period. Second, Tuccille knows that political debates are often comic, and he has a great deal of fun lampooning the nuts and flakes who enjoy screaming at political meetings. Tuccille would return to the subject in It Still Begins With Ayn Rand: Part two of a libertarian odyssey (1999) and “The Gospel According to Ayn Rand (2007). From 1971 to 1973 he taught at the New School for Social Research in New York City.Biography, Jerome Tuccille. Web, Feb. 27, 2017. Tuccille was a founding member of the Free Libertarian Party of New York in 1972, and ran as its candidate for governor of New York in 1974, gaining roughly 30,000 votes. As part of his campaign he distributed “Tuccille bills” (fake dollar bills that, he assured voters, would soon be worth more than the real thing, given the country’s inflation); and has a woman in a beige body stocking to ride through Central Park as Lady Godiva, on a horse named Taxpayer. Later career After his gubernatorial campaign Tuccille put on the only suit he owned and walked into the offices of Merrill Lynch, posing as a client, and begged for a job. That began his long career as a stockbroker, working at Merrill Lynch, Shearson/American Express and other companies. In a 1977 article for the conservative magazine National Review, he abandoned the Libertarian Party, calling it “hopelessly utopian” and “an intellectual exercise, not a serious political alternative.” However, he remained a philosophical libertarian until his death. He was the author of more than 30 books. He wrote how-to books on investing from the 1970's on; and a series of biographies beginning with Trump: The saga of America’s most powerful real estate baron (1985), and including works on Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, and Alan Greenspan. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Paul Marano and Jack Daniels. In the 1990's he became a financial writer for T. Rowe Price, rising to vice-president of that firm. He died at his home in Severna Park, Maryland, aged 79, from complications of multiple myeloma. On his death, Reason magazine wrote: "The libertarian movement has lost one of its greats with his passing, a phenomenal writer and thinker whose intellectual curiosity was only outmatched by his energy and honesty."Nick Gillespie, "[https://reason.com/blog/2017/02/17/jerome-tuccille-author-of-it-usually-beg Jerome Tuccille, Author of It Usually Begins With Ayn Rand and More, RIP], Hit & Run Blog, Reason, February 17, 2017. Web, Feb. 27, 2017. Recognition His biography of Ernest Hemingway and his 3rd wife, Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway and Gellhorn, won the Independent Publishers Association's Jenkins Group's 2011 Gold Medal for e-books in biography, and was made into a 2012 HBO special starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman. Publications Novels *''Werewolf Blues: A novel''. Secaucus, NJ: Stuart, 1988. *''The Mission: A novel about the flight of Rudolph Hess''. New York: D.I. Fine, 1991. *''The Werewolf of Wall Street'' (with Gary Greenberg). New York: Pereset Press, 2009. *''Wall Street Blues: A novel of corruption and office sex''. Mill Valley, CA: Pulpless.com, 1999. Non-fiction *''Radical Libertarianism: A new political alternative''. New York: Harper, 1971; San Francisco: Cobden Books, 1985. *''It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand''. New York: Stein & Day, 1971; San Francisco: Cobden Press, 1984; San Francisco: Fox & Wilkes, 1997. *''Here Comes Immortality''. New York: Stein & Day, 1972. *''Who's Afraid of 1984?'' New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1975. *''The Optimist's Guide to Making Money in the 1980's: A complete program for investing in the American economic miracle of the next decade''. New York: Morrow, 1978. *''Mind over Money: Why most people lose money in the stock market and how you can become a winner''. New York: Morrow, 1980. *''Dynamic investing : the system for automatic profits--no matter which way the market goes''. New York: New American Library, 1982. *''Inside the Underground Economy''. New York: New American Library, 1982. *''Kingdom: The story of the Hunt family''. McNaughton, 1984. *''Trump: The saga of America's master builder''. New York: Primus, 1986. **also published as Trump. 3rd edition, New York: D.I. Fine, 1987 **also published as Trump : The saga of America's most powerful real estate baron. Washington, DC: Beard, 2004. *''Rupert Murdoch''. New York: D.I. Fine, 1989. *''Barry Diller: The life and times of a media mogul''. Secaucus, NJ: Carol, 1998 **also published as Dillerland: The story of media mogul Barry Diller. New York: Alyson Books, 2009. *''It Still Begins with Ayn Rand: Part two of a Libertarian odyssey''. Mill Valley, CA : Pulpless.Com, 1999. *''Alan Shrugged: The life and times of Alan Greenspan, the world's most powerful banker''. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2002. *''Kingdom: The story of the Hunt family of Texas''. Washington, DC: Beard, 2003. *''How to Profit from the Wall Street Mergers: Riding the takeover wave''. Washington, DC: Beard, 2003. *''Everything the Beginner Needs to Know to Invest Shrewdly''. Washington, DC: Beard, 2003. *''Heretic: Confessions of an ex-Catholic rebel''. New York: iUniverse, 2006. *''The Gospel According to Ayn Rand''. New York: ASJA Press, 2007. *''Gallery of Fools: The true story of a celebrated Manhattan art theft''. New York: ASJA, 2008. *''Gallo Be Thy Name: The inside story of how one family rose to dominate the U.S. wine market''. Beverly Hills, CA: Phoenix Books, 2009. *''Tea Party Fever: Right, left, and in-between''. Lexington, KY: CreateSpace, 2010. *''A Portrait of Hemingway as a Young Man Romping through Paris in the 1920s''. Boston: Blue Mustang Press, 2010. *''The Double: Churchill, Hitler, and the duel over Rudolf Hess''. New York: WinklerMedia, 2011. *''Hemingway and Gellhorn: The untold story of two writers, espionage, war, and the Great Depression''. New York: WinklerMedia, 2011. *''The Roughest Riders: The untold story of the Black soldiers in the Spanish-American War''. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2015. Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy WorldCat.Search results = au:Jerome Tuccille, WorldCat, OCLC Online Computer Library Center Inc. Web, Feb. 27, 2017. See also *List of Libertarian politicians References External links ;Prose *Jerome Tuccille at Reason ;Books *Jerome Tuccille at Amazon.com ;About *"Jerome Tuccille, Libertarian Author and Trump Biographer, Dies at 79" obituary in the New York Times *Jerome Tuccille Official website.